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I’m also not going to go on and on about how bacon makes everything better, even though there’s math to prove it. (Okay, so the results are a little overstated.)

I will even ignore the idea of bacon as the gateway meat for ex-vegetarians, even though there’s a possible evolutionary reason.

The simple fact of the matter is that bacon is delicious and at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters. Just ask these guys.

The toughest part of curing bacon at home is finding pink curing salt #1. Pink curing salt #1, formerly known as Prague Powder #1, is table salt mixed with a bit of sodium nitrite to help inhibit bacterial growth. Coincidentally, the Spice House carries pink curing salt #1. This should not be confused with pink curing salt #2, which also has the addition of sodium nitrate and is used for long cures. (Think dried sausages like Spanish chorizo.) Pink curing salt #1 is for shorter curing times for foods meant to be eaten relatively quickly. Both are colored pink to avoid confusion with table salt, and should not be confused with pink Himalayan salt.

The recipe below is for what’s known as green bacon. After roasting, it is ready to eat. Just cook it normally. It can also be hung to dry or smoked after roasting, both of which will help preserve it longer. Or, cut it into one pound pieces, wrap well in plastic, put it into a freezer storage bag and freeze.

Mix dry ingredients well. Rub thoroughly into pork belly. Put the pork into a resealable two gallon plastic bag along with any leftover rub. Lay flat the refrigerator and turn over daily. Liquid will begin to accumulate in the bag as it gets drawn out of the meat. When the meat feels firm remove from the refrigerator. (7 days for thinner pieces, 10 days for thicker.) Rinse and pat dry.

Roast at 200° until the internal temperature reaches 150°, about 90 minutes.

Let cool and wrap in plastic. It will keep in the refrigerator for about a week, or in the freezer for about two months.

I don’t drink tea. I’ve never really liked it. I drink coffee. Black. I also tend to be a little contrarian by nature and generally appreciate a good challenge. Because of all of this, I’m not terribly inclined to immediately think of using our Chai Spice blend in tea. I am, however, inclined to look for other uses of it.

With the cardamom, ginger, cinnamon and vanilla, it’s pretty much a slam dunk in sweet applications. Try throwing it into oatmeal cookies, apple sauce or butter or banana bread. My wife loves it in oatmeal.

As a challenge, though, I like to find savory uses for it. The key to using this with savory foods is to add salt and a touch more pepper. They will make the sweeter flavors a little more grounded.

It’s got a lot of flexibility, and as a result, is an easy ingredient to play around with. Dice some pineapple, sauté it in coconut oil, add some chai and serve it with tilapia. Or, make a compound butter and use it with fresh corn. One of my favorite ways to use it is with sweet potatoes.

Combine all ingredients and mix to coat sweet potatoes. Roast at 450° for 45 minutes or until tender.

My absolute favorite way to use the chai, is in corn bread. This recipe, which makes me want to bake everything in cast iron, is adapted from the 1964 edition of Joy of Cooking. The ’64 Rombauer is, hands down, the best cookbook ever. If you find a copy, buy it. (Or, swipe it from your mom like I did.)

In my former life I was a bartender. That’s where I developed an understanding of flavor, the way flavors work together, how to balance them. When I started tending bar, longer ago than I care to admit, drinks generally ran sweet. It’s what people knew. It’s what they expected. That changed over time and people came to expect a balanced cocktail, one that balances sweet, sour and bitter.

The two worst perpetrators of overly sweet cocktails are sour mix and grenadine.

Never—I repeat NEVER—buy sour mix. All you need is lemon juice, water and sugar. Make it yourself. Or better yet, make simple syrup of equal parts sugar and water and use that and lemon juice. It’s easy, will taste better and isn’t full of unnecessary ingredients. (A quick internet search reveals that one of the most common brands contains only 3% juice, preservatives, artificial color, and oddly, milk solids.)

Most store bought grenadine is the same as sour mix in that they contain very little actual juice, just a ton of corn syrup and food coloring. The Spanish word for pomegranate is granada and grenade in French. Any guesses the etymology of grenadine?

Actual, for real grenadine has levels of flavor and a brightness missing in the store bought stuff. It’s for grown-up cocktails.

I spent a few years mixing drinks at a place that made grenadine with pomegranate molasses. Pomegranate molasses is by slightly sweetening pomegranate juice and then reducing it. The cooking process brings out darker, more complex flavors than straight pomegranate juice would yield.

Thanks to my friend, and former co-worker, Cristi DeLucca for helping me to confirm the ratios for the recipe. If you’re in Chicago go see her behind the bar at Bangers and Lace. Ask her to make you a Ward 8.

Like the vast majority of people these days (or least of Americans), I grew up on cranberry sauce that came out of a can. We had certain, unspoken rules about it in our house. It needed to maintain the shape of the can when put on the serving dish; it needed to be sliced with a knife and not scooped with a spoon; and the kind with whole cranberries was certainly NOT allowed. But, sometime in my early-20’s, I saw an actual, for real recipe for cranberry sauce and was absolutely astonished by how easy it was. It’s ridiculously easy. Like, I-can-make-it-in-the-time-it-would-take-me-to-find-a-can-of-it-in-the-supermarket easy.

Place spices in a muslin bag, or tie in cheese cloth. Add vinegar, spices and sugar to a sauce pan and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve sugar. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Add cranberries and cook until berries just begin to burst. About 15 minutes.

Remove from heat and transfer to a nonreactive bowl. Cover and let sit overnight. Remove spice bag and refrigerate. As with so many other recipes, after a couple of days the flavors will become really good friends.

Post Script: I just showed my kid a picture of sliced, canned cranberry sauce. She thought it looked ridiculous.

I needed an assistant. I needed someone who would handle the mundane grunt work. Someone to write recipe notes for me; to scrape vanilla beans for me; to do the dishes for me.

The hitch, though, is that I don’t have the money to pay a decent assistant. But, with a little perseverance on my part I found someone who was willing to work for Pop Rocks.

Granted, she needs to be in bed with the lights out by 8:00, but who am I to argue with the price?

This time of year the canister for our ice cream maker basically lives in the freezer. After every batch of ice cream or sorbet, it gets washed and put right back into the freezer so it’ll be ready for the next recipe. Recently, with an itch to make something frozen, and in the mood for something different I hunted down the root beer extract we had left over from a horribly failed attempt candy making venture.

Middle age, being the jerk that it is, has required that we look for alternatives to dairy in our house. While the original recipe (from America’s Test Kitchens The New Best Recipe) calls for whole milk and heavy cream, I used soy creamer and coconut cream in place of whole milk and heavy cream respectively. This recipe makes for a good base for most ice creams (just substitute another extract flavor), but works best with heavier flavors that can stand up to the coconut.

My newly hired assistant also expects a certain amount of entertainment and fun, so what we really needed was a vanilla soda so we could make Reverse Root Beer Floats.

We carry three different vanilla beans at the Spice House, but I settled on the Mexican beans. In contrast to the others, especially the Madagascar, I get earthier notes off the Mexican beans (think coffee and bitter chocolate), that I figured would work better with the root beer flavors.

Position a strainer over a medium bowl set in a larger bowl containing ice water. Heat the coconut milk, half and half and ½ cup of sugar in a medium sauce pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally until steam appears and the milk is warm (about 175 degrees), about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, whisk the yolks and remaining ¼ cup sugar in a medium bowl until combined and pale yellow. Whisk half the warm mixture into the beaten yolks, ½ cup at a time, until combined. Whisk the milk-yolk mixture into the warm milk in the sauce pan; set the saucepan over medium heat and cook, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until steam appears, foam subsides and the mixture is slightly thickened or an instant read thermometer registers 180-185 degrees. (Do not boil or the eggs with curdle.) Immediately strain the custard into the bowl set in the ice bath, stirring occasionally to help it cool. Cover and refrigerate until and instant-read thermometer registers 40 degrees or lower, at least 3 hours or up to 24 hours.

Add root beer extract and vanilla paste and stir well. Pour the custard into the ice cream machine canister and churn, following the manufacturer’s instructions, until the mixture resembles soft-serve ice cream. Transfer the mixture to an airtight container, press plastic wrap flush against the surface, cover the container, and freeze the ice cream until firm, at least 2 hours.

Combine sugars, water in salt in a medium sauce pan. Split vanilla beans lengthwise with the tip of a paring knife. Using the back of the knife scrape the seeds from the pods and add them to the saucepan. Add the pods to the saucepan.

Place the saucepan over medium heat and stir until sugars are dissolved. Let cool a bit and pour into an airtight container. Refrigerate overnight.

I have a confession to make: Last summer I went on a pretty hardcore bender. In the process I became a living Portlandia sketch. I pickled everything I could get my hands on. Working a couple of days a week at a farmers market meant I got my hands on plenty.

See, over the last few years I’ve become increasingly interested (okay, obsessed) with preservation and the surprising number of foods we still eat that came about simply to avoid spoilage and to have something to eat in February. Cured or smoked sausages, ham and bacon, jams, dried fruits and herbs all began as a way to avoid spoilage. So did duck confit. Beer and wine likely started as a means to lengthen the shelf life of barley and grapes. As did pickling.

Roughly defined, pickling involves using a liquid base that inhibits bacterial growth. Acid, salt brine and vegetable or olive oil all do the trick. My bender resulted in putting up far too many jars of pickled fruits and vegetables for a normal family of three to eat, and a kitchen that perpetually smelled like vinegar. (Although, between my pickles and the jam my wife made we would have been set if that brutal Midwestern winter dragged on any longer. So, it’s not all bad.)

The Spice House carries a great pickling spice blend that makes a great base for dill pickles, but I think my favorite style is the sweet bread and butter pickles. My mother-in-law agrees and did her part to move a few jars. She started asking politely a few months ago when I’d be making more. Now that cucumbers are showing up at the farmers markets, she’ll be relieved to know that I can start making them again.

After trying a few recipes I found online, I made one that was close to what I was looking for, but was a little heavy on the celery seed, so I pulled back on that. If memory serves, I also had to adjust out of necessity. I think I was short on white vinegar and/or white sugar and made up the difference with cider vinegar and/or brown sugar. The changes not only made a huge difference, but gave me the exact pickles I was tasting in my head.

I made a batch of these last week. Somehow, though, three jars went mysteriously missing. Curiously, my mother-in-law had been over to babysit.

Fill each jar with hot brine and cap. Wipe rims with a clean, damp towel. Place in refrigerator for at least two days to allow flavor to develop, but try to allow them to refrigerate for at least two weeks.

Alternately, instead of refrigerating, process the jars in a water bath and store in a cool, dark space where your mother-in-law can’t find them

We had long been receiving requests to develop a Spice House chorizo blend. Not long ago, after what seemed like ages of tedious research and development, we finally created a Mexican style chorizo blend that we can proudly put the Spice House seal of approval on. Our Chorizo Casero Mexican Sausage Seasoning recreates the popular mexican sausage that folks throughout Chicago know and love, all with that same Spice House quality we give all of our blends. As a transplant to Chicago, I had not been aware of this popular mexican staple until I sampled it at some local Mexican restaurants. Sadly, not all of our readers have had the pleasure of traveling to Chicago and dining at any of our city’s fantastic Mexican restaurants and taco joints. So I though it might be a good idea to explain a bit more about Mexican chorizo and how you can use our new blend to make some of your own at home. Continue reading →

I have long enjoyed a lesser-known kind of sushi called battera, it is rarely seen in the States, even at the most traditional of sushi restaurants. This sushi is comprised of sushi rice, densely pressed into a square wooden form. A layer of rice is pressed down, and then a layer of Japanese mint leaves are placed on top. This is followed with a second layer of rice, pressed, then a layer of salty mackerel and finally topped with sweet pickled kelp. The whole lot is pressed one last time and then cut into rectangular pieces, approximately one inch wide by three inches long. This sushi is to be eaten in two bites, unlike most maki or nigiri. Each bite of battera fills ones mouth with sweet sticky rice, expanding as one chews. The salty mackerel dances in a sea of rice, perfectly complimented by the sharp mint. I’ve used this experience as an inspiration for the following recipe, featuring soy-glazed shiitake and blanched kale. Continue reading →

As the temperature begins to drop, it’s official. It’s time for bourbon. During the summer, the drink of choice definitely trends toward clear liquors, and clean flavors. Fruit and frosted glasses take center stage. But, as soon as the weather begins to turn drizzly, I find myself craving amber spirits and spices. It’s the season for mulled wine, hot buttered rum and, of course, my favorite winter warmer: the hot toddy. This spiced drink is relaxing, invigorating, and somehow a mysterious cure all. Whether it’s at get together with friends, or just to sip by yourself on some blustery evening, this drink is always warming, and always a hit.

When I was young, my family would have a fish fry every few weeks. Whenever my mother would bring home a few pounds of fresh cod and buttermilk from the grocery store, I immediately knew I was in for a treat. I used to love the process of it all, dipping the fish in the flour, then the buttermilk, and then the flour again. I loved listening to the oil pop and sputter, being to short to watch my father place the battered fish into the pot. There is such theatre to a fish fry, the purposeful steps forming a dance of comestible intent. The flurry of these dancers’ movement is scored by the scents and sounds of sizzling spiced batter and hot snapping oil. No one person takes a passive role in this dance, while the surrounding viewers may only first stand and watch in anticipation, they later become eager participants in the eating. Food is about more than just the things that we digest, it is also about the process, the participants, and the community that create it. These food traditions become an act of modern story telling, a form of ritual that groups use unconsciously to pass on the customs and teachings that make up a heritage. Continue reading →